The Borders of Things

Vermin, Gamblin, and Jackson

My credibility as a quasi-culture-and-arts blogger has been enhanced in the last few days. I've started watching Deadwood and went to see Snakes on a Plane.

I'm only half-way thru the first season of Deadwood, so my impressions are limited at the moment. However, the reports on it thus far have been accurate in that the dialogue is far superior to most shows I've seen and the characters are . . . complicated, to say the least. The latter is particularly important, I think, because it reflects the unique social and cultural climate in which the show is set. Deadwood is a town with no law; it is simply a nexus of forces held together by the sheer adn tenuous fabric of social cohesion. Consequently, there is a proliferation of different personalities which are given a wider range of expression.

However, what the show clearly lacks, I realized, is Samuel L. Jackson. There is no substitutes for this powerhouse of a personality, particularly when said personality is confronted with an airplane full of venomous "snakes on crack" (in his words). More importantly, SOAP is the finest example of an actor reaching the stage of self parody. S.L.J, you realize, has been in a tremendous number of movies, in many of which he plays the Bad MF we all know and love. In SOAP, he takes all of those characters and morphs them into pure Samuel L. Jackson, himself; the result, one could argue, is parody perfected. Indeed, the line between "himself" and the role is fuzzy. For instance, while he goes by Neville Flynn in the film, he claims to be from "Tennessee," where the real S.L.J. grew up.

Incidentally, Deadwood would also boost itself if it offered free phone messages from its characters over the internet.